The Traumatic No Man’s Land of Psychic Devastation: Beyond Mourning and Melancholia

Abstract

Just as contemporary psychoanalysis has become a refuge for patients whose emotional struggles lie beyond the psychic terrain of neurosis and the dynamic unconscious, likewise, states of grief and loss may lie beyond mourning and melancholia. This essay makes a case for acknowledging a third category of loss: psychic devastation. This type of post-traumatic loss is experienced as a state of emptiness, absence, or void, and encompasses the survivor’s internal fragmentation, dissociation, frightening loss of identity, and difficulties in thinking symbolically and reflecting on experience. The state of devastation turns out to be an impediment to the process of mourning. Fragments from the author’s own experience with spousal loss are presented to illustrate the discovery of the psychic state of devastation. A case example of my clinical work while in a devastated state is also included.

Keywords:

• devastation
• mourning
• melancholia
• unrepresented states
• traumatic loss.

Notes

¹ As Garland (2004) theorizes, repeated traumatic flashbacks and nightmares serve as concrete re-enactments and have a different psychic status than symbolically-encoded memories which can be reflected upon and given personal meaning.

² For more elaboration, see the psychoanalytic literature on “traumatic loss” (Garland, 2004); “perversion of loss” (Levy & Lemma, 2004); “unbearable loss” (Stubley, 2004); “liminal spaces of mortality” (Frommer, 2005); being “wounded by reality” (Boulanger, 2007); “emotional trauma” (Stolorow, 2007); “dead third” (Gerson, 2009); “unrepresented states” (Levine et al. (2013); “unlived life” (Ogden, 2014/2016); “delayed post-traumatic stress reaction” (Klebanoff, 2016); “ghosts” and “under-processed feelings of loss” (Harris et al., 2016).

³ From the Latin: de—to take away; vastare—to lay waste.

⁴ Similarly, Sussillo (2005) notes the coalescing of the personal and theoretical in the evolution of Freud’s thinking about loss based, in part, on his own life experience: Freud’s 1917 paper was written before the significant losses in his life (mother, daughter, grandson) the experience of which led Freud away from his early detachment model of mourning to recognize the importance of positive identifications and the need for “felt continuity” with the lost object (Freud, 1933).

⁵ While devastation as a response to traumatic loss may be one of a series of cumulative traumas beginning in childhood, for purposes of this essay, I am treating the experience of devastation as a mode of “adult onset trauma” (Boulanger, 2007).

⁶ Although it’s been argued that the diagnosis of trauma has been overused for every unfortunate circumstance in a person’s life, I choose the term to recognize the psychic reality of the arc from the shocking diagnosis of cancer, the many chemotherapy treatments and medical exams, each of which served as a micro-trauma on its own, followed by the death rattle of my husband’s passing—the totality of which led to an “intra-psychic rupture” or “psychic trauma” (Gurevich, 2018).

⁷ Durban (2011) also adopts the evocative term “shadow” and uses it somewhat differently to capture the impact of our genetic and historical heritage on our unconscious phantasy life.

⁸ I eventually felt terrible pain. I am trying to capture the absence associated with the state of devastation.

⁹ This paper is not intended as a self-analysis à la Symington (2007) but an attempt at self-understanding. Given the constraints of my life post-loss, I turned to the wisdom of psychoanalytic theorists who offered much relief as well as a coveted presence through their writing. Clearly, the massive psychic disruption I experienced was not only due to my loss. Based on Stolorow’s (2007) account of the psychic impact of emotional trauma as dependent on the intersubjective context in which it occurs, my experience of trauma was in part due to the limited amount of time devoted to containment, witnessing and repair. This shortfall was not the fault of my grief counselor, my analyst, nor my friends who were responsive to my need for holding. Rather, two psychological barriers stood in the way of seeking more help. First, time constraints: Given my sudden shift in status as a widow, I was now swallowed up by the emotional and financial pressures of a slew of new responsibilities. Not only the needs of my daughter as a newly minted high school student, but the unrelenting impingement of the nasty gray mailbox which took on the threatening persona of the bill collector! The piles of mail demanded more than money; they demanded time. Now it was my turn to focus on the uncompromising timetables of the external world: mortgage payments, refinancing dates, the trust, upgrading Internet skills, etc. Clearly, I would have to undergo an “alteration of the way we think and experience being alive—that is most central for psychological growth” (Ogden, 2010/2016, p. 33). My personal-social context threatened to collapse if I sidelined my responsibilities. Given my life as an urban professional living in an upscale town, I had little time to adequately pursue the containment necessary to truly engage my traumatic loss. Unfortunately, Slochower’s (2011) account of the Jewish bereavement ritual, shiva, serving as a week-long quasi-therapeutic holding environment for loss was read too late in the game. The shiva held for me was necessarily short. No time for more than a dollop of self-care. Second, I didn’t yet have the internal space to cope with the loss, so I covered over the absence for the first year with manic defenses—in particular, Winnicott’s (1974/1989) defense of “self-holding”—until I could begin to internalize the protracted experience of tending to my dying husband. No doubt, my life circumstances resemble our patients’ with similar conflicts. In traumatic situations, as defenses break down, one is left with potholes of fear and absence: imprints of devastation.

¹⁰ Thank you, Dana Wideman.

¹¹ In a previous paper (Gerhardt, 2016b), I noted that the emotion of envy as a psychic state which, no matter how destructive, at least has personal meanings (social comparison, feelings of lack, desire, anger), in contrast to devastation, which implies a failure of meaning and an empty psychic state.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Gerhardt

Julie Gerhardt, PhD is a Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She has published in Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Psychoanalytic Dialogs, Studies in Language, Discourse Processes, and Narratives from the Crib, and is in private practice in Palo Alto, CA.